The Eternal Daughter (2022)
Director: Joanna Hogg
In the formative when the rebel in us tries to surface, we tend to look at our parents as the worse examples of how parents should bring up their kids. We look at other people's parents and yearn for lost childhood. We blame them for all our not-so-fancy physical attributes and life failures. We could not wait to grow up and get the hell out of their supervision.
Fast forward in time and space. The hard dents of life knock us back to realisation. We look at our parents through a different lens. We realise that life as adults are neither a walk in the park nor a pleasure cruise. Every corner has a brick wall to give us concussions as we rush through life's journey.
We look at our parents and see that the springiness of youth and headiness of being young has passed them by. We try to recreate the happy moments of the era that we all shared. We fail to realise that our minds only preserve the pleasant ones. Stirring nostalgic memories is like opening the proverbial Pandora's Box. Intertwined within its webs are a dark forgotten, painful cache of bitter moments, death and pain. Invoking one evokes another spontaneously.
We look at our parents, and for a moment, it hit us. They are no spring chickens anymore. They are old. With old age comes the question of mortality. Are you ready to let them go? If there were a time when we hated the sight of their shadow, we now want to know all about them. We long to understand how they steered adulthood in one piece. The same journey that they had traversed was easier than we did many years ago. Why is it so complicated now?
We see their old photos. Hold behold, we see our images as adults as carbon copies of theirs. Have we grown to morph as spitting images of them, and their present appearances will be the prototype of our old age? A scary thought! And our demeanour and mannerism, is that why they say the apple does not fall far from the tree?
This movie is a melancholic one. It tells about the life of a middle-aged filmmaker who decided to spend time with her elderly mother in a hotel that was the mother's childhood home. There is a suspicion that their whole hotel stay could be a fragment of the filmmaker's imagination. The hotel is deserted and dark. Nobody other tenants are seen, save for the receptionist and a caretaker. Slowly we realise that both mother and daughter are painfully not different from each other. Each feels irritated and sometimes empathises with the other. Incidentally, both characters are acted by the same actor. This film's recurring themes are loneliness, loss of relationships, and fear of death.
